Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

162 pointsdustedcodes338 comments

So much talk about Twitter alternatives in recent days, including people migrating to Mastodon and even Jack Dorsey announcing his new decentralized social media platform.

I was thinking, if I was to build a new micro-blogging aka Twitter alternative, what technological choices would I make to get it quickly off the ground but allow for scale?

What database technology or approach would you go for?

Would you build a (mobile first) web application first or would you start straight away with a native iOS/Android app (maybe Flutter)?

Would you go for a centralised or decentralized approach? If the latter, how would you decentralize it without sacrificing the "public town square" effect that Twitter currently has but is clearly lacking with the fragmentation of Mastodon?

To answer my own question, I would probably build a centralized platform like Twitter is now, probably opt for a fast NoSQL database like Google's Firestore in Datastore mode and to keep things simple I would probably even make sure that tweets would get automatically deleted after some years as I don't think it's needed to build a forever growing database of people's thoughts in that moment that persists for decades to come. Micro-blogging always felt to me as a thing right now, a thought in this moment but that thought could be different in a few days, months and definitely a few years, so why store it forever. Feels like I could save a huge operational cost and prevent abuse by not keeping tweets for beyond their relevancy.

What are your thoughts?

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I think you're jumping into the technical bits right away without thinking through requirements/features. Maybe we (the royal 'we' as in all of humanity) shouldn't have a public town square? When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard you are also including all marginalized voices. The MarginalizedVoice super object has EqualRightsForSquirrels as well as HatefulRacistUncle child objects. There are very valid points, that people don't like to hear, about how the concept of someone/group choosing what MarginalizedVoice gets heard and what doesn't isn't fair. If the basis of a platform is "public town square" you're going to have to deal with all MarginalizedVoices.

Content moderation (incl comments) doesn't scale so don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisements. If the thought of not having an ad-driven platform leads you to "users won't pay for it" then maybe think of a platform users would pay for or some other way to have it be sustainable.

This reminds me of a short story Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in a novel of his:

>“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.”

“This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.”

“Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?”

“No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”

=========

Your solution is somewhat similar. You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square. Going for the root of the problem, I suppose.

> You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square

"Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them. Social media like twitter allows millions of people to spread their thoughts, commentary and keep them semi-permanently online for a long time, decade or more.

I never stated I was solving the problem of people saying racist things. I'm challenging the assumption that designing a new social media platform should repeat existing designs that have public content with public comments driven by advertisements. In my opinion if someone designs with that premise it will end up the same as the existing social media platforms we have today (with a side effect of new JS frameworks being borne).

Is this the only product design Tech has: public content and sell advertisements?

> "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them.

That's very true. Maybe a better Twitter could incorporate actual geographical distance. You would have to choose where you are and could only see messages from people that are actually near you. If you move, you see different messages.

Or the distance could be ideological -- or better, theoretical.

Any user would have to choose a place on a "map" / a set of coordinates. A user can move freely at any time, but

- messages can't move and stay where the user was when they were posted

- messages can only be seen when the user is near them.

Isnt your proposal basically Reddit? Subreddits are nodes that require you to be close to them to see whats going on (via joining the sub), with a public square, /r/popular, artificially built from the top posts on those nodes. For some definition of "top".

I don't know if the limit needs to be geographical. I'd think it could be segmented by interest, ala discussion forums for particular hobbies. Those are private and heavily moderated, there are 'village elders' (mods/heavily active users), people are on good behavior because of this, they always seem to have a section for more controversial/political discussions for those who want it - and they tend to be civil, surprisingly enough, because users have a rep to protect in the more generalized sections and don't want to be a bad citizen. And nothing is indexed by search engines, you have to go to the site and search.

Reddit has this a bit with subreddits but it's far more loose and indexed by search engines, which I think is why it is problematic in certain ways.

Nextdoor is literally this. It’s twitter/Reddit but for geographically isolated groups.

Sounds like the Metaverse.

Shouting is only 1 form of communication though. Newspapers and pamphlets have been around for centuries and travel farther and last longer than human generated sound waves. So your proposal kind of simulates pre-printing press days and maybe even pre-written language days.

>"Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts.

and if you're a crazy person or verbally abusive or maybe just shouting things that while maybe true are insulting to the public morality then the police come and carry you away.

Or picketed so their speech is drowned out, or even punched in the nose by passers by.

You can argue if this is good or bad, but it’s a fundamental difference between the public square and digital recreations: in the real world, speech can have meaningful consequences. In the Twitter world, you create a new profile.

> "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts.

I disagree that it's a fallacy, the issue is that platforms have an interest in claiming themselves to be a public square. But the platform is not the square THE INTERNET, which is to say the open World Wide Web, is the public square. Platforms are the individual bars and pubs and cafes that line the squares and boulevards.

Each cafe and pub has the right to set its own rules for entry and set its own vibe and culture, but when there is an oligopoly of bars who are all megalomaniacs wanting to own the whole thing and keep people locked in their establishments for as long as possible, that does not lend itself to having a healthy community or vibe in any one of them.

Let people self-segregate and affiliate with the communities they want to. The racist shitheads will find their spaces, but they only start to multiply when they're able to wheedle their fearmongering propaganda in front of people who wouldn't otherwise want anything to do with them.

We gotta build things for the humans we have, not the humans we wish to have.

Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.

Okay, humble suggestion - remove yourself from the public square, but don't destroy it for me.

That way, you get to not hear racist stuff, and I get to not have my morality chosen by random americans.

Maybe the internet isn’t a good analog of the square.

I’m sure there are taverns near any reader here where one could “say the wrong things” and be asked to leave or maybe roughed up or even worse. Those consequences might be an important part of this not-really-discourse-or-free-speech-but-we-want-to-treat-it-like-free-speech.

Hard to say what the best thing is. Huge parts of our society don’t like consequences for actions.

You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact.

There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.

But is it. The world is very clearly (more clearly than at any other point in the past) one. It is entirely not obvious that our current level of global communication is sufficient to support this setup.

I can't agree that "global public square don't work for humans" - but even if that were the case, it's still too late to just reverse course. As long it's possible, viable and largely desired, the market will spit out a solution to this need.

Marshall McLuhan came up with the concept of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village, which may be relevant here.

Talk about an appeal to absurdity. The point is made, however, it's a bit hyperbolic.

In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square". You can't have society without some agreed-upon rules.

The real question is where are the lines, and how do you police them (and who polices the police, etc etc). It's not like we haven't solved those. It's just that the solutions themselves are imperfect like the world we live in.

>In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square".

No. You want moderation, because you don't want people saying The Bad Things™, but it's not an absolute property of all discussion.

Otherwise - you're missing the point that GP wants to destroy twitter in it's current form because we don't need a public square. It's not a matter of where we draw the lines for moderation.

In a real public square, moderation is both official (the police, keeping the peace or enforcing authoritarian oppression, depending on where you are) and organic (a loudmouth nazi sympathizer getting knocked out and nobody-having-seen-anything).

Not that the IRL public square is immune to rule-breaking. In the heat of the moment, a mob can do horrendous things in a flash.

It's a fair question whether 'public' for a person should mean ten people, or three hundred, or three million. In practical terms people can't cope with a public square the size of a million. It's too big. The range of possible 'people I'm sharing my public square with' is too great to manage.

The question of scale is extremely relevant here. It's a well-known phenomenon that as organized/structured entities grow, there are certain thresholds at which they transmute - the structure itself changes to support the new level of scale.

In terms of human groups, we've traditionally dealt with this by means of hierarchies (with all the built-in shortcomings).

Personally, I find a homogenous mob terrifying. Being in agreement with millions of others implies that the subject of the agreement is extremely basic and common (like "we all need air to breathe").

Well how about if the millions determine which are the best tweets to show by default, but do it so that quality or novel content comes through and political snark and misinformation is hidden.

Reminds me another short story i once read, Lexicographicide, by Taban Lo Liyong. The dictator, every year, eliminates certain letters from the alphabet, or was it words from the dictionary - it's decades since i read it. Thereafter none can use the same.

Read Mother Night.

You have me thinking about kind of a cool board idea. 150 person twitter boards. Cap it at 150. People in that group can all vote on their own moderation, they can't interact with groups in other boards through quote tweeting or voting, though obviously they can copy paste.

You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once.

150 being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number of course.

I have no way to distribute anything. I tried to do my own annotations board on literature but no one joined. I just think it sounds cool to be in a personable board like that.

Inventing some protocol around the Dunbar number is interesting.

There was something similar in the Weatherford's book on Genghis Khan [1][2]. This system was described to be very effective for communicating and coordinating the huge military.

> In Genghis Khan's military system, a tumen was recursively built from units of 10 (aravt), 100 (zuut) and 1,000 (mingghan), each with a leader reporting to the next higher level.

Note: I am not aware of how good the Weatherford book is, it felt one-sided to me. So I am not sure how good the civic system that depended on the Tumen was in the mongol era.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingghan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumen_(unit)#Genghis_Khan's_or...

Pretty much every effective military in history has had this kind of hierarchical structure, by both imitation and convergent evolution. I'm sure there's a post on https://acoup.blog/ about it.

Dunbar’s number is discredited reactionary nonsense, see wengrow/graeber research

> You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once.

You don't have to shut them down, you know. The British Government did this all throughout the 1970s to 1990s, where pubs (and later online services) where Republican terrorists hung out were very much left alone. They could have swooped in and scooped the lot up, but they didn't.

Because if they ever did want to scoop them all up, they knew exactly where to look, and why would you disturb that?

I've always thought that was the right way to handle it -- allow people to self-express, however abhorrent they may be. For the worst offenders, dedicate resources to make sure no harm is done (for example, monitor these watering-wells for any activity indicative of planning a terrorist attack, etc).

It also turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You ban the boards and they just immediately come back under a different name.

But that is also a recipe for echo chambers.

Anyway, from a technical point of view, this is what Mastodon instances already can offer.

You can't fight echo chamber effect with technical measures, forget about it.

> the royal 'we' as in all of humanity

Sorry for being a prick; but the royal 'we' is the exact opposite of the 'we' in all of humanity. Royal 'we' is when the speaker refers to him-or-herself with the first-person plural pronoun, as was common among sovereigns ("we the Emperor of the French"). These days most commonly seen in academic articles, where single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason.

> single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason

They mean "we" as in "you (the reader) and I (the author)". "We can see that", etc. It's as if the author is a guide on a journey.

Are you certain that's the intention? That's not how I've interpreted it in papers.

Oh, nice, would have never guessed

I think one of the key problems with twitter is the presence of constituted authorities interacting with the populace free from the formal mediation of official channels. I am in Brazil and I bring as an example the disastrous presence of Bolsonaro in the social networks, directly instructing his followers, completely free from institutional constraints. In the case of Brazil, this was a major element of destabilization of public discourse.

I am convinced that the presence of authorities on social media has to be regulated, and if I were to launch an alternative to Twitter I would consider [and look for ways to] build ethical safeguards [concerning public officials] into the system.

This is an interesting point! Can you give more detail or examples of 'institutional constraints' moderating public officials interactions with the public (in the past)? Are there rules or policy written down about what can/cannot be said that the institution enforces that goes against what the public leader wanted?

>> Are there rules or policy written down about what can/cannot be said that the institution enforces that goes against what the public leader wanted?

Well, I can't give an answer from a legal point of view, because I'm looking for it myself. But in various instances of life we see the requirement of formality between authorities and the public. In fact, all public interaction with the state is formal.

Here's a problem: the state has a set of international commitments, but the head of that state makes personal statements that go against the very official line of the government he leads [the case of Bolsonaro in Brazil]. Catalyzed by the dynamics of the network This quickly turns into another front of disinformation. The public is completely at the mercy of the machinations of the powerful entity.

I don't think there is anything in the Republican rules that precludes proper legislation on this subject.

But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. It's just that we, as in we the users, failed this great "public town square" because as soon as we get in the public we get scared and need to belong to a tribe: the Twitter tribe, the TikTok tribe, the Instagram tribe, and so forth.

[1] https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

Is there a business model to be found for building "social networks" around domain names?

Making it even easier to register domain names. Rebuilding your friend network between the DNS names of friends, family and other associates. Sharing photos and videos and birthday reminders.

I feel like it's marketing all of the technologies of the early web that enabled these things, but with great UX and an order of magnitude less complexity for getting all of it setup.

Is there a business model? Absolutely, you just have to not want to be the techno-imperator of the network graph and not want to become a trillionaire from building social services.

Disclaimer: I am building such a "social technology" around domain names, letting users truly own the database of their interaction with a service, https://github.com/plurid/deserve

The internet is not a public square for the same reason the world isn't a public square - it requires effort to see things from outside your own community. Twitter (and Facebook), on the other hand, will regularly push things to me from fascists, communists, "environmentalist" degrowthers, and other weirdos who I have no interest in hearing from.

DNS is not tantamount to the internet: you can very well have a TCP/IP connection to a computer through the internet, i.e. wires and waves, and not use DNS at all.

Having a DNS domain is akin to going into a public town square and setting up your stall selling whatever vegetables you grew in your garden. But just as the individual farmers were run over by large corporations who invented the hyper-market, just as so the individual users have been fleeing, increasingly in the past 15 years, to be under the umbrella of big-corp-du-jour.com. Making another-service.com with the façade of a "public town square" is just making another hypermarket.

And also, it's called a "public town square", with accent on town, as in "group of houses" [1], because it's meant for a relatively small population. There is perhaps a reason we don't have "public megacity squares" (stampedes and crowd crushes aside). And there is perhaps something inherently wrong when an individual has 100+ million "followers": in a public town square a stall could not sell vegetables to 100+ million people since there aren't that many people in the town in the first place.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town

> But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1].

A public square is "an open public area in a city or town where people gather". DNS is far too abstract to even remotely resemble a public square--just like "capitalism" or "zoning laws" are too abstract to resemble a public square.

Nor is foo.com a digital public square (just like your house isn't a physical public square). Public squares (digital and physical) are places where people already gather.

DNS is the public town square: when using browsers, navigating across domains, we are all fundamentally gathered in the DNS space. Me having "foo.com" is akin to setting up a stall in this public town square and selling my vegetables, and you are free to visit "foo.com" and buy into my ideology, or simply never visit it.

And yes, precisely, "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", cannot, by definition, be digital public squares: they are just stalls, booths, were we go and check certain vegetables.

When people talk about the town square in this sense they're sort of groping at the concept of a "public sphere" that Habermas talked about.

What if we let people design their own content filters? That way the platform itself doesn't have to. You can easily select popular filters from a marketplace and the number one option will probably be "hide hate speech" or "hide all politics".

Bingo. This is exactly what I recently proposed for Twitter. The idea of user defined "filter-sets" where the user chooses what they want to be exposed to. And even further, I proposed the ability to name those filter-sets and share them with others. So if a given user is, for the sake of argument, a "raging Liberal" they can choose a "raging Liberal" filter-set. Likewise, a "raging Conservative" can choose the "raging Conservative" filter-set, a Libertarian can choose the "Libertarian" filter-set, and so on. Much like your market-place idea mentioned above.

"But, but, what about filter bubbles / echo chambers???" one says. To which I say "it's not a problem I'm trying to solve, or particularly interested in. I'm not even sure that's actually a problem per-se to begin with." Seriously, the world is too big, there are too many people and too many ideas, for any one of us to accept being exposed to everything that's "out there".

Filters are a good thing, in fact a necessary thing. Of course we'd like to think that in a well educated, civilized, rational society, people would choose to make some effort to gain exposure to new and contradictory ideas for the purpose of expanding their minds and adapting and learning and what-not. But be that as it may, you still have to accept that some people will choose to filter out things to a lesser or greater degree than some others, and that some people will choose to filter things differently than you will. And that's OK.

Until your list of "popular filters" include ones such as "hide jews" or "hide blacks", following clamours for a central authority to ban those filters, or to shut down the entire platform.

I don't think it's necessary to totally kill the 'public square' concept. Rather, I think comparison with other social media products highlight that different product decisions encourage different behavior for most people. People just use Twitter differently from TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc, because of the informational and social environment these products create. These natural experiments can give us hypotheses about more explicit A/B tests for product changes:

- Does LinkedIn show us that people have less hostile posts if their real world professional connections are watching? If Twitter tried to show your posts to people it thinks you know, whether or not you follow each other, would we all be more civil?

- Does the higher bar of needing to generate an image or video to post (and a 2nd class presentation of comments) on some platforms, and lack of explicit 'reply' functionality stop arguments or bickering? The bar of typing a post in Twitter is just too low?

- Does TikTok's recommendation based on behavior rather than "interests" create less polarized bubbles? Showing you a funny dance video just because it knows you'll watch it may disrupt you from seeking out The Enemy just to disagree with them.

- Does removing an asymmetric "follow" relationship in favor of symmetrical "connections" disarm people whose hobby is having incendiary positions? If you can only have more "audience" by opening yourself up to see stuff from more people, do you then choose to connect with people that add value rather than valuing followers who will amplify you?

People saying hateful things isn’t the problem. The inability of some to be reasonable after reading them is the problem.

It’s a much harder problem to fix. There are some partial solutions, IMO. Although none are all that practical to implement.

Let's think one level of abstraction higher - do we want to marginalize voices in the first place, given that some of them are fighting oppression and injustice, and others are advocating for bigotry and hate? That is, if we cannot effectively discriminate between those two types of voices, whether because "moderation doesn't scale" or any other valid technical reason, or because it's not always possible to disentangle "legitimate" from "illegitimate" marginalized voices. It's not a binary category, because people who advocate for stuff are not one-dimensional caricatures. Do we accept the bad in the name of $good_stuff_that_comes_with_making_marginalized_voices_heard, or do we marginalize it all straight into oblivion by going after the forums of spreading ideas?

The answer to this question seems almost implicit for you, but it's far from obvious to me.

> don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisement

Why would advertisers prefer public town squares? They just want people to see their ads.

(I also like "public town square" places, as a user)

A "public town square" that allows anyone to post and comment is going to be paid by page views. The way to get more page views is to have controversial or viral content because it will bring the comments and page views. That will get the most advertisers. A closed/private group platform isn't going to get as many advertisers.

STOP! DON'T CLICK SUBMIT! DID YOU INSTALL GRAMMARNAZI?!!?

No, the adverts are going to go in your private posts and messages, so you have to see the advert before you get the message.

Like this one.

Because why market to some people when you can market to all people for the same cost? Particularly if that square can tell you that tech people look in a certain direction but cooking enthusiasts look in another, so you can pick where to put which sign since you've already paid to post your signs.

I don't have a problem with the local public town square, but I do agree that giving equal voice to all the bad ideas, while also making it easier for those with bad ideas to find each other, is dangerous. It's made more dangerous in an era where our elected leaders also say bad ideas out loud, which emboldens others to do the same. Even in a public square, you can't just yell "fire" without consequence.

> why market to some people when you can market to all people for the same cost?

It wouldn't be the same cost. Publishers charge advertisers in proportion to the number of people who see the ad.

Agree. If anything I'd make it like a cross between FB-early days and twitter. i.e. whatever a post is only immediately view-able by direct contacts. Maybe even top off how many direct contacts an account can have and require payment (monthly/yearly, tiered) above that threshold. Also give users the ability to mute/delete posts unilaterally - from their view but also possibly from the site entirely. Maybe have an "auto-disconnect" available above a threshold. Trying to think of ways around the mob mentality stuff.

One of the great/terrible things that's happened to communication over my lifetime is watching shared experience fragment. When I was a child most people used to read the same newspapers, watch similar TV. (It was boring!) Nowadays we're fragmented into different pieces of the Internet, which sucks even more.

Twitter is part of that fragmentation, but it also accomplished something decent that competitors like Reddit don't: while there are individual communities, the follow interface made them somewhat porous. People can slide into conversations or get boosted by just about anyone. Making this work without local "subreddit-style moderators" was really technically remarkable, just from a spam perspective. Making moderation work to the point where a company could actually run advertising was extremely impressive.

I don't know what you're calling for exactly, but it sounds a whole lot more fragmented than what Twitter accomplished. I don't know that this will be a better outcome.

There are plenty of hateful and racist things said on Twitter like : “all I want for Christmas is white genocide.”

But no one blinks an eye. So HatefulRacistUncle might be “HorriblyMisguidedAndRacistYoungCollegeStudent” and that’s also not ok to some of us.

So who polices this? Maybe we just go back to not reading things we dislike. You can block people on Twitter ya know.

> When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard

Why do we have to do that? Isn't the idea of having easy access for all enough? What people are so marginalized that they can't mute hateful speech and get on with their day?

One of the big problems with harassment on a platform like Twitter, and this seems to be pretty hard to get across to people who haven't been subject to it -- or don't know someone who's been subject to it, at least -- is the speed and intensity of what's coming at you if a true pile-on happens, or if a particular group decides you are The Enemy. You can mute and block a handful of jerks and get on with your day, perhaps, but if everything you post is greeted with hundreds (or even thousands!) of responses along the lines of "we're going to dox you and I hope someone rapes you to death," we're talking about something very different than "people are being mean to me on the internet."

I'm not sure if all of Twitter's problems come from mere scale; it suffers from what analyst Ben Thompson has called the Pollyannaish Assumption: we focus on the upsides of the "global public square" without accurately evaluating the downsides, and bluntly, I see this a lot in discussions on HN. It's the subtext of "why can't people just block and move on." Arguably, focusing on the downsides without accurately evaluating the upsides, which I also increasingly see a lot on HN, isn't really an improvement -- but if we're going to have platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the question of "what do you do about harassment, hate speech, and stochastic terrorism on those platforms" needs a better answer than "suck it up, buttercup."

The reason this particular problem still exists is not technical. But solutions are not compatible with engagement-graph-go-up business model.

You are correct to point out the downsides and dangers of "public square" platform, but we haven't really even started trying to implement any reasonable solutions to them.

think this is spot on. allude to this here https://acehigh.substack.com/p/operatingproduct-plan-for-twi...

to add to your point: 1/ tech stack/architecture isn't #1 or even #10 issue. think everyone (all) agree on this 2/ larger issue is how to handle open discourse. given how we are wired as species, is there a social network that is truly open that doesn't descend into vitriol? if so - what behaviors are rewarded, what are the policies etc. - this is #1 question

Hmm... If all of humanity would be better off as you say, then then why should the royal we have have to deal with racist voters? Or racist people going about free in public at all?

This was a very intelligent and targeted way of not answering the question.

The technical challenges are solved. It's not an interesting discussion to cheer for your favorite tech stack.

What's interesting is what value Twitter gives and what could a new platform target? For me, there's a slice of Twitter users that provide information, entertainment, and context that I can't get elsewhere. This could be something from a mid-level analyst re: market volatility or a college professor at a small Canadian university on Chinese politics. These people aren't consistent enough or polished enough to have established means of amplifying their opinions (a blog, newsletter, podcast, etc.) though they have so much domain expertise. Where do you find them? On Twitter. The low friction posting encourages them to share.

If I could get rid of the celebrities, the thought leaders, the self marketers, the low content hate, and the bots, and only be left with the above in a moderated environment I'd welcome this global town square.

> If I could get rid of the celebrities, the thought leaders, the self marketers, the low content hate, and the bots, and only be left with the above in a moderated environment I'd welcome this global town square.

Sadly many of those people come for the self-marketers and thought leaders though.

I've noticed this in Reddit too. A lot of posters in places like AskHistorians and AskScience have left, questions just don't get answered as much anymore and the quality of responses has gone way down. I expect those people came for the memes and interesting articles (and maybe /r/GoneWild) and participated in this value additive stuff while they happened to be around. But as Reddit got less interesting, more focused on memes and political fighting, and generally became less of a fun place to hang out they seem to spend less time on it and post less.

Political fighting on Reddit is fascinating to me. It's mostly against people who _aren't in the room_ - caricatures of the Right, or centrists even.

My real life experience is very different - I know a ton of gay Republicans, for example. Most people in a group are not the median, and all the Reddit approach does is alienate anyone that _was_ open to new ideas.

Seems like you are looking for an intelligent filtering tool-set.

Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb.

If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around.

Which existing social networks (not media ones, real ones) would you try to capture first? Facebook and Tinder both did the Uni campus strategy quite successfully. Slack did the Bay Area startups strategy. What’s your strategy?

> Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares.

The OP specifically asked about this, and reading the comments a lot of people here evidently do care.

While its true, it’s like asking “what nail and hammer am I going to fabricate?” , all while the market is flooded and capped to the brim with hammer and nail companies.

The better question is how to reach people and get them off their insert favourite platform , what makes you unique? What can you do to make sure people start buying into it? What’s your value proposition?

It’s far more a social question than a technology question (still with respect to OP who is interested in the tech)

That’s fair enough :) I can’t stop this anyways. Just lending my thoughts.

>though our tech was superb.

Please don't leave us hanging. How had you designed it?

I would like to know even more: Did you have integration with other networks via ActivityPub or other protocols?

There is a huge risk of wasting time if I cannot migrate my social network. New services are prone to being discontinued, why should I invest in a new network that locks me in?

I don't understand why not all new networks offer ActivityPub migration by default. Distribution should be much easier.

Yes, every software problem is a marketing problem.

I think how is still an interesting question.

Interesting yes. But mainly a waste of time.

Depends the reason for asking it. I wrote this Ask HN because I thought I could maybe learn/discover something (technically) new from responses on how people would build this with today's knowledge and tech options.

If you waste time on something that's interestning to you, time is not being wasted.

Not if your proclaimed goal is to create a Twitter alternative.

Waste of time why?

Because you won’t become the next twitter, you probably won’t regardless….

I think there is more to asking the question than that.

> Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb.

what was it called? now I'm curious.

Yet Another Twitter - YaTwit

But focusing on the product doesn't address what color the logo should be, or how many bikes can fit in the employee bikeshed.

Maybe also think about WHY you want a twitter alternative.

Communicating via short untargeted messages was always going to be a shitshow, why not let Elon Musk run it if he so desperately wants to?

No one here is answering your question so I will :)

Database: I’d use whatever you know and helps you get to market, but abstract it away from the rest of your app so you can swap out later. Lots of good choices here; I’d pick mysql or postgres running on rds. I would also design for sharding by user on day 1 because that can be extremely painful to add later, however, care would have to be taken to ensure it doesn’t slow you down too much early. I’d also just use an rdbms for caching unless it becomes a problem, only then would I reach for redis. I would also avoid a fanout-on-write approach in favor of fanout-on-read. It will save you a lot of headaches later.

Firestore is nice but can get expensive quickly so I’d plan for it to be a temporary thing.

2. Would go for a react native app first but there are lots of options to choose from. Go with tech you know but keep in mind that it’s basically impossible to get a AAA mobile experience on web, and in this space polish really matters.

3. Decentralized social networks never took off because they are too hard to build. Avoid at all costs unless you have some angle (ie you have some novel tech discovered during your PhD). A middle ground could be a centralized network that is open source and makes data portability front and center.

I’ll also say that growth matters a lot here. As a founder I think 20% of the teams headspace should be thinking about engineering. The rest on growth and retention.

I've never actually seen anyone in 40 years actually swap out that database.

I did once in my last job, because we were told AWS was sunning down SimpleDB. We were able to swap to DynamoDB with relatively little fuss (though obviously not none, no migration is entirely painless) because we abstracted it so well. Turns out that several years later, SimpleDB is still up and running, but it was probably a good migration anyway.

Probably a bigger benefit though, is being able to use a different DB in production (probably big scale) vs on your personal machine while developing.

I did it once in my career. We've had one legacy PHP project designed to work for MySQL. I was in charge of bringing it back to live and I decided to host in on Heroku for the sake of simple deployment. While Heroku does have MySQL addons I opted for using Postgres.

So we've just switched underlying connection and fixed a dozen of (mostly reports) places with plain SQL queries with MySQL-specific syntax. ORM library handled rest just perfectly.

I think it's fairly common to swap out your core datastore when you take your prototype / MVP and bring it to production, or the first time your product experiences hypergrowth. At point the codebase, schema and team are still small enough that this is feasible. In fact I suspect every Firestore app that hits any degree of scale swaps out the DB for at least a subset of the app.

So I agree with you with this one important exception.

I've seen it with postgres-compatible DBs and Cassandra-compatible DBs. Lots of databases build their frontends this way so that people can switch from postgres/cassandra to their product when they need a bigger DB or better performance. I've never seen anyone swap any other kind of database.

I've been on a team that ported a production system from MySQL to PostgreSQL, because we wanted the ability to add columns without downtime (this was a few years ago before MySQL gained the ability) and we wanted to build features using trigram indexes.

Heh, of course you get a bunch of responses about database swaps...

But I think the point is still valid. You probably don't want your early design to focus on an edge case.

That said, a clear API between your DB and app is worthwhile for a lot of reasons (in general).

My company did, when the DB vendor quoted as an astronomical price per server when the original licensing agreement expired.

AWS swapped famously swapped out Oracle DB2

I'd go for redis a bit earlier, it's just so easy to use! I wouldn't cache much at all to start, then at like 10k users (or wherever my benchmarking says to) I'd include it w/redis.

React is a decent choice also here because you can port it wherever. One code base for web/iOS/Android is probably critical given how few dev resources you'd want to spend on it (you've got the right idea there too).

Also agree w/r/t decentralization. I think this is a fantasy for nerds but most people really do not care about privacy no matter how much people try to explain it to them.

I guess one thing I would add here is I'd work very hard to minimize operational costs for as long as I can, until you can show the explosive growth that'll interest investors. There are a ton of scrappy ways to save money on a tech stack like this early on, and you can probably find a way to get that AWS/GCP/Azure credit money to basically make this free to operate until your F&F round.

One you have a userbase, just... idk, iterate with them. Everyone and their mother probably has ideas for what they'd like Not-Twitter to be, but finding what the GCD is for that would be important to sustain growth I bet.

What even does the idea of a decentralized social network look like?

Every social web I imagine branches out from me (if I am the user in question) and then goes out to gather information from there. So on and so forth. Unless I'm thinking about the wrong information gathering system.

Thanks, really good points and I agree with a lot of it.

I find the frequent invocation of a town square a bit perplexing. It evokes the idea of a place where strangers may gather to have an exchange of ideas, which sounds quite pleasant at face value.

However this is not something that I've ever done IRL and I rather doubt that most of those who invoke this idea do this regularly either.

The kinds of discussions that you might imagine having in public with strangers who might have different values and backgrounds would be wildly different from the same discussions online. The metaphor is quite a broken one and at this point about as useful as pretending that the screen I'm looking at is an analog to my actual desktop (which mostly one exists to hold the screen).

While this may come across as mere pedantry I think it is actually quite important to ensure that when we discuss platforms that are going to be nothing at all like a town square that we are more realistic about what kinds of conversation and interactions we might want to encourage or discourage.

Town square is invoked because it is what worked for spreading new ideas before. It is spreading the new ideas part that is important in this context, not the particular historical vehicle for it.

The point of the public square proponents is that it would be nice if one of public platforms would step up to perform the function in a way suitable for it.

The old "town square" worked fairly well...for a bunch of people who already had a lot of other social ties, shared social norms, and were (socially) pretty heavily invested in their communities. When those other conditions were not met (say, Saturday night and a crowd of cowboys from a cattle drive, or laborers from a nearby RR construction project, or ...), then the old town square absolutely did NOT work for the good, long-term locals.

On the internet, enforcing the preconditions needed for the town square to work well is difficult at best.

I agree that it would be nice if more platforms facilitated this kind of exchange . I don't see Twitter doing this at all. The majority of my observations suggest ideas being lobbed at high speed, attached to a heavy object.

Besides that I'm unconvinced that this kind of platform for spreading new ideas is what most users on Twitter want from Twitter. The metaphor has become repeated so often that it almost sounds like it is Twitter's reason to be but I rather doubt that it was designed with that in mind.

If you want to design an alternative Twitter then my advice would be to not start with the tech. There seems to be plenty of stuff out there than you can bolt together to get things started, and which comes with options for scaling if you subsequently need it.

Some thoughts:

- Start with thinking about how you're going to maintain engagement without pushing people into algorithmically-generated echo chambers, or into attack/defence behaviour that will just turn your New Twitter into the same cesspit as Old Twitter.

- Also think about how you're going to moderate content - because you're going to have to do it whether you like it or not, and its going to have to be at various scales from post-level to policy-level. There's a very good argument to be made that Legacy Twitter's product is content moderation [1], not software. Human nature being what it is, you may find that eventually it's your product too.

- Also, consider how you are going to deal with state-level and semi-state-level actors who will attempt to infiltrate your platform to use it as an amplifier.

The tech platform will help with the above, of course, but above all I think you need to consciously design the thing that you're building. That thing isn't a software platform or a social network or a community. It's something else. Figure that out first.

And if you want to build something that makes the world better (as opposed to worse, as in Old Twitter), you might consider how people can use your new platform to get stuff done in the world, rather than just shouting and meme-ing. I wish I knew how to do that though.

If you do build something like Twitter then please try to build it so that it doesn't cause harm.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

"- Also, how are you going to deal with state-level and semi-state-level actors who will attempt to infiltrate your platform to use it as an amplifier."

Not just state actors but anyone with an agenda and budget really. companies, ngos, political parties etc. Manipulating twitter to push an agenda or narrative is big business and not limited to nation states.

For real. What is plausible and what is maintainable should be very high on the list.

When a social media site runs on ads, it will inevitably begin to shift to being advertiser friendly. When it's a paid site, it will struggle to get users. Might be worth investigating a Patreon or Reddit type funding, where paid users get benefits, awards that can be handed out, message amplification and ad blocking, but where anyone can create an account.

It might be useful to also integrate the Brave browser format where the users get credit for viewing ads that can be traded to other people or spent in an online store for fabulous toys and prizes.

The reason I'm saying all of this is that what an alternative to Twitter needs in order to serve the people is a funding method that does not rely on stocks and shareholders, but that also has a method to manage invasive business practice while remaining profitable. The system should be technically owned by the people and therefore be a place that people would want to gather together without the worry of money having to change hands in order to use it or have a painless experience.

Aside from that, it should offer frictionless open APIs to developers (<- very useful for getting people invested in the platform), it should have a topic filter (for instance, I am not interested in Sports at all, so being able to filter out Sports related topics would vastly improve the experience for me), and in addition to that, there should be a free-for-all town-hall section that removes any filter other than your personal blocklist and does not allow ad/business accounts to post but could have non-targeted generic ad billboards.

That should help minimize echo chambers or at least provide an easy way to step out of your echo chambers without abandoning them.

People need a place to speak and think and breathe without ads and agendas being shoved on them, where ordinary people can speak freely to other people and be evaluated on the quality of their thoughts and posts and not on artificial amplification of weaponized memes and polarizing agendas crafted to serve the financial desires of the wealthy elite.

Also, you can't trust one person (even yourself) to hold the line against the riches and power of the world, you can't trust even an organization founded on the purest of intentions (like Mozilla) to be able to resist both the peaceful and hostile machinations of such people should you reach market saturation.

The company charter would need to be built on principals designed to prevent the consolidation of power and control over the platform into the hands of the few, with some system in place to enable the people to eject other people from the platform entirely. I'm not sure what that would be, maybe every 3 months the top 10-1000 accounts get put to a vote (from verified human account users) and if there are enough votes then those accounts get memorialized and the user has to take 3 months off from the platform and then create a new account.

Sorry for the brain dump, but these are things that might have either improved Twitter or prevented it from becoming a billionaire's plaything and are therefore things I would like to see in whatever rises from its Phoenix Ashes.

I think posts like this illustrate why MBAs retain their power over organisations, despite the constant complaints about them by engineers. There couldn't be a greater perspective gap.

The "how" is the absolute last question, the "what" is the first.

Can you imagine the following conversation:

"Hey you should sign up to Facebook!"

"Oh, why?"

"It's got a great tech stack!".

Me nether.

To design an alternative Twitter you must first understand what made Twitter popular in the first place. And then at some point, in the far distant future, let the name of a tech into your head, or a line of code onto your screen.

Said in good faith. I know so many engineers who wasted so much time because they couldn't understand that outside of the constraints of a job their skills had no monetary value by default.

Well actually, an alternative Twitter is still missing the point. Twitter *is* microblogging.

The real question Elon should have asked is what's beyond Twitter, i.e. what should he have built instead of trying to pivot Twitter towards, with all its baggage?

Twitter was microblogging. Its massive growth in the early years was based around being able to turn SMS into a broadcast medium. From there it became a kind of worldwide water cooler. It was fun because it wasn't all that serious.

Twitter is Serious Internet Business now. Which is why most of the noise comes from a very few individuals and it is riddled with bots. The value of your opinion is based entirely on your number of followers.

Building an alternative is difficult. Google has tried and failed, multiple times. I think Elon would prefer for it to return to the water cooler days.

RSS

People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds.

No server side agorithm and api just returns feeds sorted by users preference.

If I follow too many people to view chronological, then I can have client side algorithms to sort.

Aggregate queries across all the feeds on the server identify hashtag trends and create useful metrics (retweets, likes, etc).

>RSS - People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds.

RSS might replace Twitter for your particular use case. However, it doesn't replace Twitter in general case for the public because RSS is one-directional.

The phenomenon of the "Twittersphere" includes bi-directional activity like replies and retweets.

As an analogy, this Hacker News site has users taking part in reading and writing activities. A few users like to spread the word that they consume HN via RSS just fine (e.g. maybe get feeds from https://hnrss.github.io/).

But users (who are not just pure lurkers) can't use RSS to upvote/downvote comments or post their own replies. Therefore, RSS can't replace HN's website for general usage.

Likewise, RSS can be a way of consuming NYTimes newspaper, but RSS can't replace the NYTimes itself.

RSS is an undeniable convenience for readers but its limited scope does not provide viral mechanics and feedback loops for writers publishers.

RSS works at the abstraction level of "protocol for data download". Sites like Twitter and HN, etc work at abstraction level of "virtual marketplace of ideas" -- and that function is out of scope for RSS.

So whatever can replace Twitter will look like something closer to Twitter than RSS.

EDIT reply to: >That's a client side question, IMHO. If you want your client to show you replies,

I was talking about the RSS-user-themselves wanting the capability to _write_ the replies and not reading others' replies. RSS is not a read+WRITE protocol. It's a pull-based reading protocol.

That's a client side question, IMHO. If you want your client to show you replies, then you configure it with a crawler that scans other RSS feeds for posts that reference the post you are interested in. Content moderation is thus all user based due to who the user decides to follow and what crawler(s) they choose to use to find related posts in feeds they aren't directly following.

I like the idea of an RSS twitter but discovery needs to be solved. Maybe you could also automatically publish the feeds you're subscribed to?

I remember Google reader used to let you “like” articles and view articles with lots of likes.

Also you could add friends and view what they subscribe to and like.

And just a basic text search is useful to find material related to a topic of interest.

I think it’s important to remember that this isn’t meant to consume infinite time but just a way to see what you’ve noted as interesting. I think it’s like a newspaper where you spend 15-60 minutes reading. Not something that consumes every waking moment with infinite discovery and content.

How would you handle replies and nested replies using RSS? I believe that is a major appeal of Twitter.

A thing I truly liked about Google+ was the ability to separate contacts into "circles" to differentiate between real-life friends, family, online friends, colleagues, etc. I wish more social networks used that kind of approach.

I didn't get to use Google+ in its prime as I was averse to all social media at the time, but I totally agree. That was a great concept

Twitter just launched a feature called Circles that has been very well received in my social....circle.

They give you exactly one circle. Twitter missed the point entirely.

I think that the (dead, gay) Something Awful forums model is a decent solution to content moderation and monetization.

An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back.

Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars.

Change your avatar? 5 dollars.

Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars.

Ad free? 10 dollars.

Access to archives (posts over a certain number of years old) 10 dollars.

Not too expensive and no recurring costs for good citizens, prohibitively expensive for bots/trolls.

You're missing the most important detail of why that worked. Forcing payment solves issues surrounding identity. Permabans on other platforms don't work when you can make a new email and sign up again. Sure, there's a cost to bans ($10) but it's minimal, but evading a permaban means finding a new means of payment not linked to your identity which is a lot harder. Not impossible, but enough that it stops most bad actors.

Yeah, it's a good system.

Also, on the forums, you can look at anyone's rap sheet and see exactly the post that they got banned (or probated or permabanned) for. Let's you know what sort of person you are dealing with.

I think there's a really good point in here that you sort of touch on that is lost on a lot of new products.

I'd pay $20 one-time for ad-free Twitter even though I can just have a (free) browser extension do it. I'd pay $20 one-time to remove all suggested posts/users/etc, even though the same extension does that too. Archival access would be really interesting on something like Twitter where just about everything gets archived externally or screenshotted anyway.

But the minute any of these become recurring costs, even on the order of $1/mo, I'm out.

I feel like the search for recurring revenue has hampered a lot of company's ability to make real revenue.

>I feel like the search for recurring revenue has hampered a lot of company's ability to make real revenue.

There's a weird mess of consumers and incentives on the internet.

Users generally don't want to pay, so now they're the product. Just to get users products offer unsustainable free services and then die when they reach the breaking point or fail to get folk to pay. Users get upset when the products ask them to pay or revoke their free tier or just vanish ...

Wash rinse repeat.

IIRC App.net was a pay version of twitter.

I loved the idea, it got a lot of attention, but it didn't pick up enough users to get going.

App.net went braindead in 2014 and finally died in 2017. 2014 was a long time ago in internet terms. Just look at Mastodon: people are always declaring it dead, but the project's official instances alone are bigger than App.net at peak and it's funded on Patreon subscriptions. Mastodon's part of the fediverse ranges from 750k to 1m active monthly users using this model before adding in comparable and compatible stuff like Pleroma and Misskey. There's been a shift in people's willingness to pay for services that doesn't start or stop with social media.

Edit to add: App.net also had the problem of needing to justify $3m in funding. It "failed" because its model couldn't do that quick enough to make investors happy. A normal platform with slow but steady growth that depends on subscriptions doesn't have that problem as long as the bills are paid and enough people are happy with it to maintain growth. Mastodon proves it can be done, still running and growing a half decade after the entire SV media declared it dead because they didn't understand how self-funded platforms work. Others can learn from and build on it.

It was, with tiers for users, devs, etc. It lacked users, but it also was born in an environment where Twitter wasn't yet "awful" by most people's definition, let alone owned by someone with mixed popularity. If app.net launched today, it may be a different story.

I would certainly like to see more attempts as time goes on.

> Change someone else's avatar

This is hilarious

That's the real money-maker.

EDIT: The way it ends up working on the forums is that if you do something to annoy someone that isn't against the rules, they can spend 10 bux and change your avatar to a photo of something that you don't want showing up on every post you make (and likely giant red text that says something like "Ask me about [something offensive]), and then you have to spend 5 bux to undo it.

Yup. Profiting directly from the drama. More drama? More money! At least in the short term. In the long term it just became a weird cliquey mess. I think that hurt their growth prospects as it put off potential new users. But those users just went to reddit anyways.. reddit consumed their entire audience in the end.

On rdrama.net you can buy awards with karma or money. These let you you ban a user, unban users, force them to include text in any comment ("Trans Lives matter") is a common one, or turn all of their text sideways.

It's hilarious to use and seems sustainable.

One-time fees are not very sustainable. Unless the model included essentially building an endowment the first ten years and then funding the business off of interest.

Lots of devices attached to ongoing services today are sold for a one-time fee. For most of their existence, Microsoft and Adobe had very sustainable businesses based on one-time fees. It is a fine model. Software companies today are addicted to "recurring revenue" (thinking that is the only way to get sustainable cash flow), but a lot of people will pay you $20 once who would never pay you $1/month, and there will always be new people using popular products.

One-time fees are a perfectly fine model for a business, even if it is unfashionable currently.

They were releasing new version every other year. You cannot sell a new version of a website.

> and there will always be new people using popular products.

If you succeed in being the go-to platform for every new generation you might be able to coast on that. But the last 20 years have shown that each generation gets its own new social network.

That was for desktop software. The era of buy it, download it and it's yours forever. Not an ongoing service.

Actuarial science might have a thing or two to say about that. All you need to do is make sure the average amount people pay is greater than the average cost for the life of an account. Before the recent explosion in subscription pricing for everything under the sun, we’d been selling software on one-time costs for fifty years. Subscriptions certainly are attractive and easier for businesses, probably easier to sell with freemium models, but they do have downsides like cancellations and not much money up front (may take longer to recoup investments).

> Unless the model included essentially building an endowment the first ten years and then funding the business off interest.

Ten dollars is surely much greater than the server costs for a single user for a month, or a year. That one-time cost may well be designed to be an endowment of sorts. Plus the avatar changing fees are probably, on average, not one-time fees.

I've gotten wildly differing responses from saying that New Twitter should just be a non-profit. Have a mission for public good, disclose financials, earn sufficient revenue to operate and pay employees. Wikipedia does it and their biggest drama is that they get way more donations than they even need. They also seem to manage moderating gobs of content with relatively little public drama.

The SA forums have been going since 1999.

A mixed model would be kind of interesting... Like, first time signing up it's free but if you get banned then you have to pay, if you get permabanned, tough luck.

That doesn't work because people just sign up again with a different email, bots can do this all day for free. Its the up-front payment method that makes it possible to effectively ban people.

Whatever platform does not allow a search like "What did user U publish on day D" has a specific label:

it is substantially the Soviet Pravda.

Imre Lakatos defined totalitarianism in terms of "how distant in the past can I retrieve documents" - the shorter the span of accessible data, the worse. In historical totalitarianism regimes such obstacle was instated to hide possible ideological changes in the regime, to give an appearance of monolithic consistency. In general, if you have a collector and checking history is not a basic feature, than it is nothing but a joke.

(PS: the first post on HN is the 'Y combinator' submission from pg, Paul Graham, on October 9, 2006 - you find this with one URL. This is how it is supposed to be - the distantmost past is as accessible as the recentmost addition.)

I think an audit trail of a government is very different from being able to pick through the personal posts of an individual person. I think it'd actually be a fantastic feature to have history gently fade away. If I could disable other people viewing my tweets older than 1 year, I'd enable it in a heartbeat, and I'd think nearly everyone else should too.

If what you write should better at some point disappear, you should not write it in the first place.

This, of course, in the collector with the purpose I am imagining - the replying poster clearly wants to visit a very different place. In the restaurant you get "restored" through proper treatment, while at the bar the idea is to get disturbed through every device: restaurants shall not be bars.

When I, in the distant past, thought about checking T., it was because some specific great minds had approached it: I checked it on the idea to consult the statements from specific prestigious Intellectuals - not random posts.

And: the replying poster has not provided a speckle of a justification for the "bohemian" idea proposed.

> an audit trail of a government is very different

The platform that the submitter proposed for discussion reportedly has an extraordinary participation of leaders, ministers, politicians and official speakers. So, while my original statement was a parallel in an absiological context ("if something important was submitted it has to be retrievable"), even a direct more literal application of the idea is possible.

I think the right to be forgotten is one of the worst things we've lost in the modern Internet era. People should be allowed to say/do something stupid when they are young without it coming back to bite them when they are older.

Within reason -- for example: pictures from college parties. There's no reason why these should be forever accessible. A nice, graceful decay on some data would make sense.

> something stupid

I would say a good example of "something stupid" would be to publish something that should remain private.

Mastodon has a built-in post culler for this purpose.

Can speak to the DB side of things: Redis in front of an RDBMS scaled well for me at https://glue.im/noah

Timlines/activity are built from the RDBMS and served from Redis as a cache. New posts are added to the cache directly as well so only needs to rebuild if you lose the entire cache which only happens if we need to restart the server. Also not storing full posts in Redis, just IDs, pulling via primary key from DB is very fast.

That same setup was used for a previous app that had a few million user base (don’t remember the concurrent user numbers though) and it ran well with a clear path to scale it up.

More thoughts: build a mobile friendly web app first, you’re gonna need some sort of back-end to run the iOS app anyways and tweaking a web app UI is much quicker than resubmitting iOS builds to the App Store.

I can’t help but think part of the answer is to offer users more powerful filtering, so that they may exercise their own free will over what they see and hear. Sure some would choose an extremely narrow subsection of society to hear from, but others would cast their net wider. One might even choose to monetise “smart filters” that took the legwork out of building and maintaining such filters. The “smartness” need not be an algo either, one might choose to outsource filtering to another human offering that service.

I wrote a little about this after a particularly irritating experience with LinkedIn, but the same goes for twitter or any public forum.

https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/

You say "powerful", I hear "complicated".

If you're on Twitter and you get targeted by, say, Ben Shapiro, the horde that comes at you isn't trivially filterable/blockable. There'll be thousands of them, and they're creative; just like spammers/phishers, they make a game out of evading mitigation measures.

At volume, this is a very tough problem to solve.

Let people create whitelists as well as blacklists when it comes to letting users post replies so that they can go "whitelist only" when that happens, at least until the furor dies down.

Brilliant. Whitelist only mode would be that only the people you follow and who follow you can message you, and the ability to mention, ping, or find you is turned off.

That's so easy that a Jr. Programmer of moderate talent could whip that up in a long weekend.

They work 84h a week so yes totally doable.

I don’t doubt that the problem is a tough one to solve. This is (partly) why I suggest offering a marketplace for filters, and so a reward for those who crack the problem. Of course there are always going to be some people who which deploying any kind of filter is just too much work. There were always some for whom editing a .killfile was too much.

I expect this would end up like Netflix's algorithm bounty. It turned out no one could do much better than Netflix's own engineers. Twitter already had a system that worked in the form of sharable blocklists, but they hobbled and eventually removed it for some reason.

I could easily build my own just by iterating through the follower lists of prominent objectionable people to block them if Twitter didn't prevent it.

"It looks like you're using automation!"

No shit.

If this was aiming for the scale of twitter replacement, the realistic answer is: read as much as possible from what was published about the current twitter architecture and try to replicate that while avoiding things they used in the past. If you're thinking in terms of a specific database rather than queues that write into partitions distributed around the world, you've probably already lost. Maybe think really hard about splitting out mostly-readers and pop-stars and whether they need input/output that's architected differently. Find people who design event stream architectures.

Because let's be serious. Apart from youtube comments, I don't think there's anything the scale of twitter for short messages at the moment. (and even that's much simpler problem)

I'd bet between, whatsapp, messenger, instagram chat, meta probably deals with the most volume of short messages, likely more than slack / discord / telegram,but hard to know

Those are not the same category. In communicators you can store the user / channel from a given time period in a specific partition and that's about it. It's likely never going to be queried after delivery since everyone has a local copy. If it does, you just download a slice based on a client-side generated hash. And the metadata basically doesn't change either.

Compare to Twitter where new people continuously query old messages with quickly changing replies, likes, retweet, mutes, blocks, etc to account for. But you don't want to materialise everyones timeline on every change either. However you likely do want to keep highly replicated snapshots of popular tags and popstars instead of processing actual events. And then you need some system that can query both and merge them into a usable personalised view.

Doesn’t Google search basically all of Twitter Anyway? Doesn’t that mean whatever Google has could easily itself be Twitter?

>Apart from youtube comments, I don't think there's anything the scale of twitter for short messages at the moment.

discord, telegram?

The complexity in twitter is that you have one channel per user, so you want to scale the "personnalized timeline". Whereas telegram/discord have clear channels.

The technology to a huge extent doesn't matter, except for things like decentralization because those impact how end users use it.

Honestly, I'd probably just build Mastodon. I use it sporadically. My feed is exactly what I subscribed to, and nothing more. That of course doesn't make for an amazingly engaging platform that constantly pushes people to engage and to create new accounts, but that's precisely how I like things to be.

You probably won't get rich from catering to people like myself, though.

The time seems to be ripe for moving to Mastodon. A few people in my twitter feed have made the move over the last few days, so I decided to give it a go again, and it's pretty nice. The down side is only a handful of the people I follow are over there. But people seem to be looking for alternatives now, so maybe there will become a critical mass.

It's easy: Go to https://mastodon.online/auth/sign_up and sign up. Go to https://twitodon.com/ to try to automatically follow your Twitter friends on Mastodon. Then use the search bar to search for other of your friends. Click on their followers/following to look for other people to follow.

I put my thoughts about next-gen social into a concept that I like to call "Eigensocial" and expressed that through the Finclout project.

1. Micro-blogging doesn't add much in 2022. Velocity of content is too high and comment vs content is real. What would it have what Discord or Telegram can't provide? The content distribution to the world? Is that really a feature in 2022?

2. Followers are a terrible approximation of shared interest.

3. We use social media to be entertained and not to work. Ideally to connect with people that can help us move ahead. Stack overflow : Learn from smarter programmers. Finclout: Learn from smarter investors.

4. Do we really need a public global town square? Even if yes, there will always be boundaries based on spoken languages. (Chinese, English, Spanish, French, etc). How much does it help us that an Indian doctor can talk American politics to a South African? https://twitter.com/majornirmal/status/1587129879341867008

5. How is moderation baked into the product? People will exploit all your weaknesses to get ahead. For Finclout we implemented that as incentivized tasks for all users. How much do you allow for "edge" content. How does your system define "edge"?

6. Bots create engagement. Engagement creates DAUs. What's your strategy to use bots in your growth path? For finclout we don't. However, we have content partnerships in place so the app never feels empty.

7. What added value does decentralization bring? We partnered up with DeSo and ran a node for a while. Yet at this time, I think the only valuable innovation is decentralized identity management. Probably SBT will be the better solution here.

8. In 2023 we should go to a social sites because it provides us with the userbase to connect us with interesting people. I love Lunchclub for that exact reason. IMHO, this is how a social platform should be.

I'd take a step back. Twitter did the right thing when they switched "favourite" for "like" for example.

Mastodon still only has favourites. There's no way to say "I like this toot, but not enough to retwe... boost it" on Mastodon. Favouriting is more like "this is the best ever and I want to return to this later" -style bookmarking in my mind.

I grew up in the golden age of Myspace. There was a lot of value, I think, in needing to directly choose to have someone in your social circle. If you didn't add someone as a friend, you didn't see their posts. It's a lot easier to be civil online when you know all the people you're interacting with. And perhaps a lot safer.

https://spacehey.com/

Twitter is not a technical problem.

I mean, don't get me wrong, there are interesting technical challenges in a high volume site like Twitter. However, the problems and real existential challenges Twitter faces have nothing to do with tech.

> What database technology or approach would you go for?

I feel like people consistently underestimate the difficulty of creating a data backend for a social network.

It has to be readable and writable in real time, yet still performant enough for picky consumers. It needs to be able to handle text search. It needs to handle many-to-many relationships at scale (something that mainstream (NO)SQL databases struggle with). It needs a robust authentication layer, and probably a load of other things on top of this.

Building something like Twitter is still, in 2022, a really hard technical challenge.

> Building something like Twitter is still, in 2022, a really hard technical challenge.

Building something like Twitter is pretty simple.

Building something that scales to 400 million MAU is a really hard technical challenge.

Build a protocol specification instead, and we can have multiple competing implementations (like Email). This is what Jack Dorsey was suggesting.

Based on cryptographic signatures.

If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33419574 by dustedcodes. Signed: mejutoco", then nobody could take this converstion away from you. It would be federated by all competing services that use this protocal.

Sounds a bit like the Nostr protocol.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

Doesn't this already exist in the form of ActivityPub? Whether you're using Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely, etc., you can interact with instances that use that protocol.

There's no way Jack doesn't know this already exists.

It's mentioned here: https://atproto.com/guides/faq

Honestly this project looks pretty interesting, and I hope it takes off. Want more decentralized tech without horrendous "defi" attached.

I'll chime in here, since I'm building one. Twitter does one thing that I opted to change--everything is public. The short-form, low-effort, public posting that defines twitter leads to a platform that promotes trolling over discourse. Haven[1] instead promotes private discourse where every post is private.

It's fully decentralized in that everyone runs their own instance, but with all open protocols (RSS), it would be trivial for someone to build a centralized/federated instance that can still interoperate. The open protocol which enables a decentralized model is the most important part of that decision.

With RSS as the protocol, you get interoperability with every blog ever for free. Combine private posting with public content and you get something really neat--the ability to have private conversations about public content all on the platform.

You also get an elegant solution to free-speech vs civility. No public content means no discovery so you'll never see anything from a source you didn't explicitly opt-in to. No trolls and no spam.

Arguably, this is more of a Facebook alternative than a Twitter alternative but I still think it is a very valuable approach to creating more civility in our broader society.

[1]: https://havenweb.org

Does the "you only see what you subscribe to" increase the echo chamber of the web. Would it led to "here are more thoughts that you already agree with" which means people won't have a chance to see the other side of a coin?

Is a public-mostly forum like Twitter actually good at escaping bubbles though?

It seems to me that most of what passes for discourse there is yelling at the “other side” and smug/snarky in-group posts.

It's definitely a risk. I remember talking with peers in undergrad about the campus bubble we lived in compared to the surrounding community (which was not as affluent). Ultimately I think people need safe spaces to explore ideas. If they are surrounded by a world that is a battleground over identity, then they're going to dig in and fight. If they are surrounded by people they trust, then I think they have room to explore different ideas.

Freedom of association is more fundamental than freedom of speech. If you can't stop the mob from shouting you down, your voice won't be heard.

The foundational act of a Twitter alternative is to create silos where communities are allowed to exclude other users. The platform is not a public "town square" — it never was — it's a private forum, where users may choose who they associate with.

> The foundational act of a Twitter alternative is to create silos where communities are allowed to exclude other users.

So Reddit then.

The biggest problem I have with twitter as a platform and as a concept is that individual tweets lack any and all context. "Threading" together tweets doesn't make them linear. If you want to restrict post size, then you have to make threads linear or you wind up losing any and all context farther down the thread. There winds up being a large group of people who try to argue things that have already been said further up the thread or you have people arguing over a misunderstanding because they missed the first 10 tweets because somebody they know retweeted the 11th because it had a snarky soundbite.

Twitter right now is all noise and no signal. It's a bunch of people running through a crowded train station where everybody's shouting but nobody can hear more than a few words of what any single person is saying. How can that ever be a useful platform for civil discussion? It does make for a great broadcast platform. "The train from Chicago is leaving in half an hour. Mick wishes his mother a happy birthday."

Decentralized, free, anonymous and out of reach of the kleptocracy. This is impossible presently since they own all the internet infrastructure.

You mean you can't scale to giant without the kleptocracy blessing in 2022?

There's lots of bare metal around

Still have to go through the undersea cables!

> I would probably even make sure that tweets would get automatically deleted after some years as I don't think it's needed to build a forever growing database of people's thoughts in that moment that persists for decades to come.

IMO, that's an absurd proposal completely detached from reality. I wholeheartedly care about what I write/post on any site. It's a trip down the memory lane. Even on Hacker News when I see what I posted in my earliest days, I feel proud of how much I have grow since then. I would be pretty pissed if I can't trust the fact that what I post won't be preserved.

I dunno why the technical bits matter at all. I would use a 'better' twitter even if it consumed 2x the data or had 2x the latency. The thing about the backend, is that it is the 'back' end.

The UX will be central to such a platform, and that's all we should be having a conversation about. I'd go as far as to say, that the central challenge of convoluted technical solutions like 'decentralized platforms' is to find a way to hide the backend away from the user. You want them to be none the wiser about what goes on behind their pretty website / app.

Launch it on a $5 VPS first. When you get enough folks to knock it over, you've validated the need.

For one, allow following hashtags as a first-class feature, and move them out of the tweet body.

The problems with Twitter are not technical, they are baked into its design.

1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider the six degrees of separation: applied to Twitter, we realize that it only takes 6 retweets to reach basically everyone. Following "Topics" is close but not good enough, because you cannot voluntarily opt into topics or really understand why a given tweet is within a topic; Twitter uses its Computer Magic to categorize tweets and makes all the decisions in a black box.

2. The only negative feedback is unfollowing. This is a problem because it means that practically all forms of engagement are treated equally. Oh, this tweet is getting a lot of comments, let's boost it so more people see it! Whoops, it was about space lasers. We are stuck repeatedly fighting Bad Takes because they have to be argued against every time they are brought up and always gain nonzero traction. They are never put to rest. There is very little negative incentive against being a garbage human on Twitter, especially if you're anonymous.

Going to nerd out on you here and point out that in a six-degrees-of-separation situation, you'd need 7! retweets to reach everyone. Carry on!

Edit: or maybe 7! - 1

What do you mean? Six degrees of separation implies that you can connect with any person on Earth with just 6 hops.

Twitter is not a technical problem. We as a society are simply unable to wield such a tool in any useful way.

When you combine three obvious truths:

* people are tribal to the point of irrationality

* controversial clickbait bullshit travels fast and right to page 1, erudite corrections go on page 7 and are cheerfully ignored (see point 1)

* people don't listen, they wait to talk

There is no value in giving everyone such a platform. It achieves no useful purpose whatsoever that cannot be achieved more neutrally, deliberately, and less sensationally.

On Bullshit is required reading.

How about we all go back to having little forums and chatrooms for our niche interests and finding cliches of people online we fit in with instead of making a Twitter ripoff

Do you ask about how to build Twitter if it didn’t exist, or how to build something that people would switch away to?

The №1 issue to overcome in the latter is to achieve Twitter’s network effect fast, so the first goal would be to design for easy bridging, connecting or aggregating.

For the former, people open the page to see content they yearn for. That depends on their interests. If you only show content from their follows, there is too little; if you show content from the whole platform, their interest will be drowned in things they don’t care about.

One easy trick is to show messages from people you follow with high probability, and messages from people they follow with lower probability, and so on. But unfortunately, you eventually need a stronger recommendation algorithm, which can show viral tweets (like the “dress color” illusion from 2015) and suggest people that tweet about your interests. This is the main reason people come back to the app every day.

The replies feature is actively radioactive. I’d recommend only showing replies from people you’ve approved, and putting other replies in a separate menu without a notification counter.

On decentralization, unless you add a hefty seasoning of cryptography and replication, it does not make sense. Beyond fragmentation, the risk of servers going down or in malicious access to private information or forgery is better addressed in a centralized fashion. Trust is easily lost.

Besides, the tech becomes a no-brainer with a central system. Go for a relational database and index as things take steam. Start synchronous, then move to async batch jobs.

As others have said, I wouldn't. Twitter is a cesspool because its design and human nature fundamentally work together in very unfortunate ways.

I might consider building something vaguely similar with a different featureset meant to fill a vaguely similar niche. A few half-formed thoughts about possible features for such a system:

- There is a hard limit on the number of users a given account may reply to, loosely inspired by Dunbar's Number. Let's say 50. This forces people to prioritize carefully who they want to interact with.

- Adding or removing someone to your reply list takes a day to take effect. This might reduce the degree to which flame wars can spread - by the time people have unlocked the ability to reply to something controversial, they'll have had a little time to cool down / have people generally lose interest.

- Limiting the number of tweets, retweets, and replies an account can make per day. I don't have any concrete numbers here, but the goal is to make people think more about what they actually want to reply to.

I'm not confident anything Twitter-like is actually a salvageable concept. These are some things I think might improve the odds of building something similar that isn't a toxic dumpster fire by nature.

I'd use blawg chain technology (if you don't know what that is, look it up in a few weeks when I've finished the toiletpaper).

I'd build a desktop only native application. You'll have to route ports down to your desktop to receive incoming connections, maintain a list of peer nodes in a text-file by hand.

It won't even support encryption, but you can always post base64 encoded pubkey encrypted stuff if you want to.

Everyone will be a content moderator, but nobody can really do anything but remove messages from their local storage (I don't know how moderation can even work with blawg chain technology, I'll have to keep this in mind when I write the toiletpaper).

There won't be algorithmic content federation though.. There will be a list of posts from everyone on the network, and there will be another list of posts from people you follow, and a third list of posts from people who follow you.

It will start off as a joke, but a few.. special people.. will see it as the answer to everything and it will become a booming success and make everyone, except myself, very wealthy.

It's going to be wonderful, I promise.

I think the issue is when everyone has a platform, not everyone is heard. Loud, controversial minorities win over other content. The critical thinking level of the global population, on average is terrifyingly low. We forget this in engineering circles.

There's also the issue of accepting that what we find distasteful, offensive or horrific is a cultural artifact of the time we live. Generally accepted common sense today would've had you at the gallows not that long ago.

I think the only way forward is with compassion. Compassion for people who hate, who are racist, who think the world is flat, who have views that we can't stand. These people are maginalised BY us. Their opinions do not reflect cultural norms, and our varied norms fail to co-exist on a global level.

Compassion. Tolerance and kind acceptance of those we dislike. We don't have to agree, and we should certainly control those that do physical harm to others.

The rest is compassion and education as the river of culture winds around.

If we can't build that into a system, the system will just be either a repeat of Twitter or echo chambers of toxic agreeability.

I can't speak much about the technical stack, although I would probably write it in Python and or TypeScript because that is easiest for me, or in something exotic like Nim for fun.

If decentralized, I would think about a clause in the license that mandates some kind of federation. Although, it seems like the ability to not federate with certain instances is seen as a selling point for some Mastodon users.

Most importantly, I would not try to build a Twitter clone. Twitter is often "yelling into the void" aka write-only, and when you get something back it is often aggrivating. Sure, you can also have great exchanges and meet nice people, but all in all it is just not so pleasant.

What I would go for instead is a clone of early Facebook or MySpace. You have a profile page, you can present yourself as you like. You have statusses but no global feed by default. People can send you private messages, but they can also interact in some fashion with your profile. A social network, instead of social media.

One thing I'd like to experiment with is derived identities. Say you want to participate in a community (forum, group chat) with similar people. You want to use a pseudonym, but the community wants some assurance that you are really a teenager, or a woman, or a technology expert, or whatever. Your main profile would "prove" this, but you don't want to disclose your identity. So you create a new account, and the system would vouch that the new account is e.g. from a woman older than 21 with an account in good standing, but disclose nothing more. I think I can work out a cryptographic scheme so that even the server cannot connect the two accounts, but everybody can verify the proof... but it is tricky.

Looking forward to verified celebrites and government members with alt-accounts posting controversial stuff under pseudonyms ;-) ... OK maybe not, when I think about it.

What about this: Use SQLite.

Make it one SQLite file per user. All the read/write are parallelized per user. Backup db file would be smaller, easier. Each service node can handle N users, less for heavy follow users. Should be easier to scale horizontally the with user count by adding system nodes and Storage, networks, web handling process.

Interesting concept but it falls apart pretty quickly once you start adding in the "social" parts of the network.

Also, you're still going to need to index all posts somewhere. Unless you don't want search functionality on your site.

Interesting idea. However, how do you query things like "list the followers of this user"?

Edit: search also becomes difficult

Where do you put cross-user events? Like retweets or likes?

Twitter seems like a great tool for organizations and people to make announcements to me, but a terrible format for providing actual content or conversation.

If I were to design something that would replace twitter what I would design would ultimately be way less popular, but I think it'd be a much better place, and if nothing too similar to original twitter could ever be created would lead to a better world (from my point of view) than one with twitter in it.

The short answer would be: I would as much as possible design it to not function as a place for discussion. It would exist, entirely, for people to share content they found interesting.

So if not conversation what would this platform be good for? Making announcements and linking to interesting content that is hosted on places that aren't twitter.

Step one in achieving this would be to eliminate the concept of "threads". If I never see another 30 tweet long thread that should have been a fucking blog post somewhere it will be too soon. (I'd be perfectly happy to build in long form content tools that this platform would host and could be linked to in "!tweets", just that they wouldn't show up in "!tweet" feeds).

Step two would be to as much as possible limit or discourage things like commenting. You could "retweet" something you found interesting with a comment on it, but you can't comment on anyone else's tweet directly. They will not be shown your "retweet" unless they follow you.

So that'd be my version. Basically the people you follow can "tweet" links to content that exists elsewhere, along with a short amount of text describing why you care. Alternatively they can do a (single, not a thread of) "tweet" which is just text in order to enable things like small status updates, "Just letting everyone who follows me know I survived the earthquake", or "We have sold out of the cinnamon biscuits" type of things.

I'm increasingly believing a "public town square" is of little value across major economic class lines, as any "conversation" meant to represent reality will simply at some point devolve into rhetorical struggle between the haves and have-nots. The haves will then respond with various reality-distortion campaigns, winning over enough of the have-nots to keep the economy spinning for them, and at that point you may as well just go watch Saturday morning cartoons which will make more sense than any "public town square."

To solve this problem: You should be periodically required to submit evidence of your income to this alternative Twitter, and only be allowed to post and see posts of those in your economic class. If your income changes then the class you are visible with/to also changes.

I have some plans (but no time) for an experiment on how the timeline works. I want to focus on curation and have the poster rate items he curates. You'd read from most to least important (with a lot of balancing, but as transparent as possible).

Happy to share details with anyone interested.

I'd take a couple of steps back and try to fix the problem at the core. What the Web needs is a way to do backlinks. If we had them, everybody could just host their own content, in whatever format they want, and others could respond to it on their own servers.

Add some GPG signatures into the mix, and people could be mirroring and caching content as much as they want without there being a problem authenticity.

Now of course doing backlinks in a way that isn't open to abuse and spam is difficult. But I consider that a much more worthwhile endeavor than just hacking together yet another Twitter clone that fundamentally suffers from all the exact same problems as Twitter does. I don't need yet another middle man to decide what I can and can't view.

> would get automatically deleted after some years

Some people may not be allowed to delete (or to be deleted by someone else) their "tweets". US Presidents are one such category of people - all of their works while in office belong to the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act

In some lawsuits, records such as tweets need to be produced in what is called "discovery". It is possible to lose lawsuits - by default - for either destroying or refusing to turn over such records. A modern example of how expensive such behavior can be would be to look at how much Alex Jones is going to be paying out.

This simply means those people must ensure those records are copied and stored elsewhere. Communication services don’t have to store records for the president.

Twitter has deleted many tweets subject to the rules you cite and it’s well within their right to do so.

It was also pretty funny to read Elon's DM's with his billionaire friends and aids about the twitter takeover due to this when he wanted out.

Kudos to -discovery-

If you don't want something read on the future, don't write it. Its that simple

I think the tech stack would whatever is easiest for the specific team you have. The app doesn't seem complicated.

The platform that I would like would:

  - Block links. The platform is for sharing personal thoughts and quips, not spreading marketing or propaganda.
  - Block "re-sharing." This would include detecting and deleting duplicate posts across accounts.
  - Cost a token amount of money. Enough to filter out scammers and bots.
  - No "engagement algorithm," your feed is exactly what you design it to be.

I just want a place where I can see what people are doing, what they have to say, without all the BS, and where people are accountable for the content that they produce.

What is your goal is the first question you need to ask yourself. If your goal is to replace Twitter at its scale, then it's completely absurd, Twitter will continue to be popular for a good decade, no matter what Musk does because network effect.

You shouldn't try to design an alternative to Twitter, you should design a social network that catters to a crowd that is not Twitter or don't care about Twitter.

Tiktok, no matter how much I despise this social network, didn't try to copy Twitter, Facebook or Youtube, it did its own thing, and with the help of massive VC investment and marketing campaign, it became popular, because it was different.

Yet another Twitter knock off isn't going to replace Twitter.

> I was thinking, if I was to build a new micro-blogging aka Twitter alternative, what technological choices would I make to get it quickly off the ground but allow for scale?

This is fundamentally the wrong first question. The first question is “what is the problem with the existing Twitter compared to what some identified market wants that I am going to solve that will make my product a compelling alternative, and how do I solve it”? Technology comes after, and is shaped by, that decision.

Otherwise, even with optimal tech decisions, you end up at best with a Twitter clone with no users and no reason for people to choose it, abd a tech stack whose ability to scale doesn’t matter.

The design of a new twitter doesnt start with the how question. You can write it in php or even python for all i (or the market) care. The question is what a new twitter should be used for. Politics and social issues will always be loud and argumentative, so we probably dont need that as thats what twitter already does. A nice community for people to follow other people for various crafts and topics would indeed be nice. Maybe a place where we can follow popular scientists, technical organisations, artists, actors, and generally speaking anyone non political. Something as basic as twitter in terms of ui but without the garbage twitter has.

1. Start with a simple tech stack you’re already familiar with though this will likely change over time 2. Build a few of your favorite features, either because you want to use them yourself or because you like building that kind of feature 3. Get your friends and family to use it with you 4. Listen to their feedback, or ignore it, and build the next few interesting features 5. Get your friends’ friends and family to try it out and give you feedback 6. Keep going as long as you enjoy the process

You may not end up where you set out to go, but at least you enjoyed the ride and learned something new!

Less about the tech, I think basically anything would work. I think from the start I would go with 300 characters, and allow edit with a button that has an audit log of all edits.

I think a nice approach would be to be mobile first on my end, ios/android app and expose a nice api for people to build their own frontends. The only downside of that is how do you keep a popular frontend from hijacking someones tweets and modifying the text.

What I do not have an answer for is, how do you handle the comments, to me, they are generally more interesting than the tweet itself, so how does one get those front and center.

First, we redesign the humans.

I feel like people are overstating the effects of mastodon fragmentation. Email "works" and is functionally extremely similar to what is going on with Mastodon and ActivityPub (the data stuff is not exactly equivalent, but...).

The beauty of a lot of it is how HTTP URLs to other domains just work. You see a thing, you click a link, you see their profile. Sure it's on another domain etc, but..

There's definitely a lot of busted data at the federated timeline level. But maybe that's actually fine. Gives the entire network a bit of an analog quality.

I already built the alternative. Check out the video on the front page for an intro.

https://cancel.pointless.click/

I said this in another Twitter thread and I will say it again

Here's an idea: stop trying to fix social media and instead try to connect with people in real life and we as a society might be happy again

You know that image people share occasionally that illustrates how all the different functions of Craiglist were carved up into separate specialized apps? That’s what I think I’d personally like to see for Twitter.

Journalists that need a place to post live updates as well as links to their long-form stories? Make a platform that does that, and only that.

Bots that post a jpg every day? Make an app that does that and only that.

Get customer service by DMing companies directly because they respond on Twitter for some reason? Make an app that does that and only that.

And so on.

> Get customer service by DMing companies directly because they respond on Twitter for some reason?

This is sort of what https://www.resolver.co.uk/ is. But the main reason companies respond on Twitter is that it's also a place where you can catch the attention of journalists. There's positive synergy in having everyone fight on the same platform.

I agree. I was just thinking of examples of things people do on Twitter.

I think twitter now would be something like tiktok where relevant and entertaining stuff will be shown to me without browsing for it. That is the true value of Tiktok, saving the search time for something interesting.

Also one reason I think Tik Tok is successful is the lack of political content which is toxic and stressful. A lot of political content is designed to get you to be angry at the "opposition" which is not a healthy state of mind.

To quote Nilay Patel [1]:

> I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems.

Things you mention like the backend data store truly do not matter. LIke at all. If Facebook can run billions of users on MySQL it just doesn't matter.

You then get into product questions, which (IMHO) are more interesting. Twitter grew originally as mobile-only. As in, the 140 character limit came from the (then) SMS limit and you signed up with a phone number. That's interesting history but would you do it the same today? No. Smartphones are ubiquitous.

It might be useful to reduce spam to tie an account to a phone number but that's a separate question.

What people on HN tend to focus on however is:

1. The API; and

2. Whether it should be federated or not.

For a truly open API, Twitter 2.0 just becomes plumbing, and not very interesting plumbing at that. Are you building a company or something like the Wikimedia Foundation? If it's a company, you lose the ability to easily advertise (ie monetize) your users with third-party clients so an open API is only ever going to exist until you get enough traction to throw all the third-parties off. We've seen this time and time again. It's Lucy and the football. It boggles my mind people keep falling for it.

You could monetize with a subscription model but users don't want to pay for things. We've seen this time and time again too.

As for federation, HNers seem to like this. They want Email 2.0. But email is terrible because of federation. Federation allows bad actors. more importantly, it doesn't solve any problem actual users care about. So it's going to be centralized.

Which leaves us to the biggest problem of all: the network effect. How do you get users on a social platform when everyone is on the existing platform? The answer is you really don't unless you invent a new product (rather than copying an existing one).

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

The Anti Social Network

Here is our humble take on a new MVP much better Twitter where you:

* discover links using swipes * curate & share stream feeds * follow ideas not people

https://mutter.cards

Check this out, and help us build this better, by sharing your suggestions on:

feedback@psytech.ai

So much talk about content moderation. When you have a good community then they do the content moderation. Like here and good subs on Reddit. It's all about the quality of the community. The problem with Twitter is that there were too obsessed with growing the user base over anything else.

I would keep it simple on the tech side, and would probably stick with an SQL DB, along with a solid full text indexing service running separately for search.

From a UI perspective, I would probably also improve the way threads are shown, as currently I find it impossible to follow conversations on Twitter.

Don't delete my content because you don't think it will be interesting to me in the future.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Twitter isn’t the proverbial “town square” but rather the “gladiator arena”. Several reasons.

I suggest thinking deeply about what you want to accomplish (use cases) and then work backwards to what needs to be build (user flows etc.)

I don't understand the problem with fragmentation. I specifically don't want to have all my online presence to be centralised in a single account on a single system.

So it's OK for me to have 5 different Mastodon accounts, each representing a different aspect of my life.

I would probably try to involve sociologists who specialize in a relevant field. I cannot stop thinking that every sufficiently large social network so far seemed to degenerate into a complete cesspool. Some important bits seem to be missing

It may show how much I've gone down the dark side in recent years, but it feels like the wrong question; unless and until the business case/plan, and functional requirements, are figured out, technology is immaterial and undefined.

Distributed. Possibly peer-to-peers and easier via regional? Or via air? And extremely easy to get into if you’re “in the area” and know at least one person.

Difficult without being “in-person” and in the know.

A centralized platform has brought more problems than solutions.

This question was relevant 15 years ago when the tech for building something like this did not exist. Today the tech exists so it really doesn't matter.

A still unsolved problem is how to moderate effectively. Spend your time with that problem instead.

I'd make users pay before posting. A small amount, just pennies. But you'd have to click on the payment before any post. No ads, no data collection, none of that. Just the fees. A lot of noise just wouldn't get posted.

Well, look at Trump.

Trump was kicked from Twitter, so he made an alternative one (Truth Social). It seems to be running on Mastodon, which is what you suggested; and he made some custom app, which you suggested.

Unfortunately, I cannot see Truth, as Truth is America-only, apparently.

edit: Gab made an alternative Twitter, also based on Mastodon.

You see... right-wingers _had_ to do alternative Twitters as they were kicked of the real one. They have an experience in this.

Decentralized, signed and/or encrypted messages. Search and topic management done on different providers. Use Activity Pub. Bridge to others - at least to read/view.

Been working on something but it's not ready to release.

Not sure about the technical tools I'd use (my default flask and mysql? Or django and postgresql?) but I would definitely revive Vine as part of my platform instead of just letting it die like Twitter did.

If you are thinking alternative to twitter. You first think concept rather than tech stack. Because tech is not a problem today. You can select or create what you needs about tech. Twitter does not offer tech.

> what technological choices would I make to get it quickly off the ground but allow for scale?

Wrong question. End users don't give a shit about your tech stack. You should be thinking of requirements and features.

But you need a tech stack to make sure those features are performant and highly available.

Not until you have enough users!

I would pitch to top influencers a certain percentage of the company if they can bring in the fellowers and skip the VCs. Even if the top influencers take 40% of the company, you still come out on top.

How many though? I assume that the top influencers are not going to move to your platform exclusively (using yours in addition to what they already use isn't going to work, at best you'll just get crossposting from the other networks) unless they get offered enough.

Since they risk their entire following, I'm guessing the top posters want to have a potential profit of about 100 million dollars, and possibly more than that. That means that by the time you have 100 influencers, you have to convince your members that you'll be a 20 billion company in a year.

First I would make a thought-beam in my secret volcano lair. Then I would get some off-the shelf twitter clone. Then I would beam the instruction to use it into a couple billion people's brains.

I can think of lots of ways I would design a twitter that was a better user experience. I can't think of many ways that improve it while also being profitable. And that's the rub.

Let's step back a bit and not ask about the mechanics. Twitter was, and, so far as I'm concerned, the nervous system of the Internet. It's main strength is saying "Hey, you were interested in this -- go to this URL". It's a pubsub system. There are many places, many industries that don't care about the latest celeb or Elon, but they do want a signaling system -- and they want it secure and encrypted. As an example, the oil and gas industry has to communicate with about 200,000 stations. The messages are simple -- why not a private Twitter for them? Sure, they could use NATS or Kafka on a private net, but why not this?

Main suggestion would be to remove advertising, keep it boring, and limit the geographic reach (by default). So, kinda like a public utility, boring boring boring.

I know this isn't your question, but I would disallow media of any sort. I feel like it is contrary to the spirit of the platform and adds to moderation cost.

I love this idea but the mainstream will hate it. Short attention spans need memes and reaction gifs.

One key feature change: messages travel at 500mph.

Send a tweet from New York, it takes six hours before people on the West Coast see it.

(if you pay $20 per month, maybe it only takes two hours).

I’d definitely use blockchain. Basically every tweet would go on the blockchain and if a tweet reaches 100 likes you could sell it to someone as an NFT.

What I've always wished existed for social media was something more along the lines of a protocol (like email or rss) than a platform (like Facebook or Twitter).

It seems like as long as a communication form is tied in to one specific provider by design, then there is always going to be unsolvable problems with deplatforming users, content moderation etc.

That's what I'd love to see- decentralization in the sense of anyone can feasibly host a server, rather than the web 3.0 / cryptosphere sense. I genuinely think that would solve most of the issues we see from monopoly platforms.

It already exists. Have you never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub ?

Everyone seems to forget that Twitter was extremely interesting because people on MSN/GTalk were "sync" their status to a web list.

Problem #0: how to make money to pay for all that tech.

Pick your favorite stack. Quick iteration is far more important than scale until you reach critical mass. Twitter did the same thing.

Your tech choices will have nearly zero impact on your success or failure. You need to figure out content moderation and monetization.

Nice try, Elon ;-)

I don't want another huge social network. I'd have a number of smaller autonomous ones.

Get users first and worry about scaling later.

Maybe something more like https://pol.is/ ?

It would be minimal and ephemeral, much like 4chan - but without anonymity and 0 tolerance for illegal content.

I wouldn't. Twitter is a garbage heap of trash that is no use to nobody and should die a forgotten death.

Twitter, Facebook, most social media are a matter of a post, and ratings.

Why not have a multidimensional rating?

Make a experience where you need actual verification like kyc to enable certain features.

Just add the same features but focus on a Reddit like format with communities.

You don't. You build something better.

Twitter is a form of low quality information broadcast in that roughly 10% of the active users post anything and the remaining 90% consume it, so at this point its basically just an overpriced RSS feed + friend of a friend logic (FOAF).

Social media is in decline, so building new social media is the last desperate resort of people seeking to broadcast their opinions in a venue they control. If you are like Elon Musk and have made enormous wealth by encouraging people to inflate the value of your stock then control of social media is important especially when your primary value channel is at risk of removal after calling people pedophiles or challenging the SEC. Same for Donald Trump.

For everybody else social media is either a party of deplorables or just a venue for mindless streaming entertainment (TikTok).

Unless you own large advertising media channels in need of eyeballs I would recommending investing all your time and money into that next thing that will replace social media out right.

We already have telegram for this, no need for another twitter.

The format doesn't matter too much but make sure it is very leftist. Twitter became popular as a leftist bubbles and most journalists are leftists too so they will join and the rest will be history. Now is your opportunity

I’d build it by creating Xanadu. Xanadu is the feature set.

The problems are political, not technical

Elon, is that you asking this question?

Great discussion, one thing I would throw out there is that while we're all used to having some kind of "unique" thing in the market that attracts users, I think in this case one could feature-for-feature copy Twitter, and as long as Elon Musk isn't in charge that would be the "differentiator".

I think in the next couple of years we'll see more of this (or should, anyway); companies that are very similar but with different operating philosophies competing for the same market.

Figure out the business model first. Until you can do that, you will fail no matter how clever your technological solution is.

    probably opt for a fast NoSQL database

I hear MongoDB is badass rockstar tech /s

Poaster in the house.

Honestly, this is a bunch of excitement over nothing. I would move on.

Very simple, I wouldn't.

OP are you Elon Musk ?

I'll tell you what someone should have told Zuck.

You need to separate out the permissions for synchronous communication and async since we already build an "alternative twitter" in the 2000s -- it was called... SMS.

What you are going to need to do is VERY CLEARLY distinguish what is permission for lack of a better phrasing... "broadcast" from permission for synchronous comms, because those are two VERY different things, both in a social sense and in an IT sense.

(You do know what peer to peer means... right?)

I signed up for Facebook, and to me it was like "*Wait... do these goddamn pedophiles not know some of us went to computer camp?"

The air of entitlement off the folks I spidered off from that network of Harvard people was... intense.

For context, after Columbine, the school I was in told us how to dial out (9, then 911) and in parallel, told us if we wanted we could apply to the township police.

I didn't have the same ability to express myself back then, so I wasn't able to articulate what I will today, in a less threatening way:

Why the fuck would I call the police if someone shot my teachers? They abuse me. They smirk that they think it's funny because we have less money, we only get to sue them if it's a test case with the ACLU.

Right as I was getting to a point I could put it that simply, 9/11 happened, and it felt like they took those... techniques... and deployed them on the rest of the world. Which sucked, since back in 412, up until the Iraq war you could pump gas then go into the station to pay for it.

(They'd take down your plate if you drove off.)

Anyways, please include a voice chat option in your network... I am on the autistic spectrum, but I've gotten a lot better at spotting when someone is a literally a spy and voice gives a lot of information.

(Or you could skip all of the above, and focus on why people seem to need to move from network to network, when it feels like in a comedy context, we've known what's OK for a very long time?)

Elon, is that you?

Spot the engineer looking to build something without doing any real empathy research first. This is why the Metaverse is currently flopping, bruh. Take a step back and stop getting erect over tech strategies. Ask if people even want this first, and then concern yourself with user requirements first and foremost.

Why so many (wrong) presumptions and anger over your own presumptions?

HN has a largely technical audience. The "how" is the question here as that is what I was interested to hear from other people with a variety of experiences. Twitter was just an example which feels topical today and it also has an interesting problem to solve. It's much harder to scale a public town square than let's say the same volume of messages sent over WhatsApp where it's mostly 1:1 and some n:m conversations where n and m are relatively small numbers.

Not looking to build a new Twitter, don't have the time or desire, but I find the how interesting nevertheless.

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